


hunger is to give the body what it knows it cannot keep

by amb-roses (overtture)



Series: his kiss, the riot [1]
Category: Professional Wrestling, World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Angst, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Major Character Injury, Memory Alteration, Mental Health Issues, Minor Character Death, Non-Consensual Possession, Non-Linear Narrative, Not Beta Read, Obsession, Psychological Horror, Temporary Character Death, ask to tag, except idk how to write horror so shrug, going with mature bc i dont wanna get killed for not being able to read the tone of my own work lol, or: the demon king is an actual demon aka its vaguely eldritch in nature
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-22
Updated: 2019-06-22
Packaged: 2020-05-16 05:38:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19311736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/overtture/pseuds/amb-roses
Summary: One day, he finally leaves home, follows the call into the dark. One day, all he hears past the howling of the void that erupts from within him is a single, blood-curdling scream of- One day, he comes home with the weight of something larger than him on his shoulders.Fergal lays in bed, wide awake, as the walls whisper into his ears of how much they love him.(Don't let it get out, they had screamed. Don't let it out.)Or, when Fergal is young, new to the concepts of Demon Kings, to Bálor, he gives it his name.





	hunger is to give the body what it knows it cannot keep

**Author's Note:**

> whew, so let me just say, i have NO idea what the hell this is. i wrote a paragraph or two for this nearly a year ago but ditched it because i wasnt sure what i was doing? still arent but actually fleshed it out into a concept anyway lol
> 
> anyway, we need more eldritch horror abstract demon king balor in this fandom! the mans got a demon for gods sake, demons are NOT human and i think the best kind of demon is one that acts like one. like something that isnt human and never will be. this is all conceptual ooc practice but i had a lot of fun trying to break out of the fanon demon king mindset

Her name is Bayley. Their names are Karl and Luke.

Finn is hungry for things he knows he can’t have. He almost wants to call it selfishness, but this– this is too much, too wild to be considered something human like selfishness. This was a hunger that clawed at the insides of his chest, caught his heart so high in his throat it almost hurts to try and breathe deep. Like if he coughed strong enough the musculature would rip at the seams and spit it up on his tongue.

But she smiles at him, hugs him close and laughs like she hasn’t got an actual demon under her fingers. She jokes with him and remembers his likes, dislikes, routines, asks him if he’s eaten anything, if he’s slept well and how she could help. She grows sunflowers, poppies and cornflowers in his barrens like promises he knows he can’t keep, like truths he knows he’ll never speak, everything she’ll never ask but answers with a smile and open palms anyway. The gleam of soft-sweet lip balms she offers him, careful hand-written tea recipes on old napkins and deep chested cackling from under blankets, everything tinted in the mood of late night-early morning movie marathons.

But they plant him between them, throw arms over his shoulders and around his waist, cajole at each other and laugh at and with him, call him brother and family with such affection he feels like he’s choking on a geyser of wants and needs he’s never let himself acknowledge or feel. They bare their necks, their wrists, their chests, backs, their souls and hearts to him without a second thought and carry him through the no man’s land of his mood swings and attitude to lake views and summer tans, the sticky sweet presses of lips to late spring sunburns on cheeks tight with too-big smiles.

Finn is hungry for things he knows he can’t have. Luckily for him he’s friends with some of the most stubborn people on the planet.

 

* * *

 

One day, he leaves home.

One day, he finally follows the call into the dark.

 

* * *

 

Fergal has been haunted for what feels like his whole life. When the lights are out and all he has is his own deep breaths and the softest of whirrs from his fan. When all he has is his own deep breaths because it was too chilly for a fan.

He must be haunted, he insists to his parents, because he can hear voices in the wall.

It wouldn’t be so creepy if it wasn’t always when he was alone in the dark of night, if it wasn’t for what snippets he could catch. He tries very, very hard not to think about it. But those voices, those noises, _all of it,_ is unlike any creature he's heard. Definitely not human, whatever it is.

The only kind of supernatural he believes in now a days are ghosts. Ghosts and spirits of people who’ve passed, and that’s all there is. Nothing but those are real, and even then he’s iffy. But he hears the noises, the whispering and the shaking, the choir of voices, children’s, men’s, women’s, all speaking as one voice when the house is silent with sleep, and he _knows._

So he must be haunted by some sort of ghost.

Fergal lays in bed, eyes blankly open, as the walls whisper into his ears of how much they love him.

 

* * *

 

One day, he comes home with the weight of something larger than him on his shoulders. He wonders if this is what Atlas felt like.

His parents know something is wrong but... where does he even start?

 

* * *

 

He’s twelve when roughhousing put his elbow through the drywall and something shouts at the top of human lungs before going dead silent.

“Fergal! Are you alright?” His father races in, relaxing at the sight of him on the floor, his friend pale faced a few feet away. “I heard you shout.”

Fergal doesn’t remember shouting, not his own, but his throat is sore.

They buy repair tack, almost clay like, and he patches the hole in the wall to a flood of tears that aren’t his own tracking down his face.

 

* * *

  

One day, he comes home. His mother calls him by his name and he blinks in a strange surprise for a moment that leaves as fast as it comes. Weird.

 

* * *

 

His body breaks over and over, burns him inside out, but he eventually picks himself up again, over and over.

Over and over.

The one secret on a timer, the one that he knows will reveal itself in time. That the demon that tattoos itself into him, paints itself across his skin, isn't the one that lurks in his heart. For as deep as it runs, his greed runs deeper. For every word Bálor contains within him, for every time the demon revives him, his own pride chokes him out, refuses death. For every claim that Bálor has ruined him, he knows he was born out of something incendiary, tightly packed gasoline, gunpowder, kerosene, packed into a glass cannon of his own making long before the King had become part of his life.

Bálor is a demon, so what does that make him?

 

* * *

 

One day, he gets hit by a car. He can feel each individual bone shatter on impact, each scrape and rip of his skin as he skids across unforgiving asphalt.

He barely gets a glimpse of something  _beyond,_  body far away and lungs flooding, before every light on the street explodes in a shower of sparks and the Earth below opens freely for something,  _something_ , to crawl forth.

Finn only catches the faint, easy crunch of dense metal under pressure past the sounds of his own instinct blaring in his ears, in his blood, in broken, twisted limbs he can't feel.

He wakes up, unblemished and healthy three days later. Witnesses claim- well. That they watched a dead man stand and skulk from the scene.

Finn tries very hard not to think or remember it at all.

(For a few moments, he'd thought he'd seen...)

 

* * *

 

When Finn wakes up, he starts shaking.

He tries to clamp it down, contain it to his hands, but it claws up his arms, takes his heart in it's teeth, tightens his diaphragm and rips up his spine. He has ten seconds of familiar agony before he falls out of his body and back into unconsciousness, a flicker of so much there’s nothing for him to process. So it was Bálor’s doing, then.

To cross into their shared plane, where both Finn and Bálor could exist in the same place together, separate from each other, he had to squeeze through the void. Naturally, humans were never meant to travel through, but it was the only plane that could handle the existence of both a Demon King in their true form and a human man. Neutral territory at the cost of the pure, white hot, nerve burning agony of getting there. It’s actual physical appearance was reflective of the both of them and their connection.

So of course, it’s a bedroom.

This is Bálor's favorite room in their shared plane. Finn’s old bedroom, a small thing, hardly furnished, back when he had just met the demon and become bound to him. Just starting out in life, young, naive, _innocent_. It's unmistakably fake, though, the air thick and heavy, dust mites catching in perpetual twilight, room unnaturally dull in color. A memory.

His shoulder doesn't hurt, but it's a simple glance to the full-body mirror on the opposite wall to shatter any semblance of calm he had mustered upon arrival.

His shoulder is a jagged smudge, like someone took a shitty pencil eraser and ran it over the entirety of his injured shoulder until it blurred into a mess of color and fuzzy visuals, almost static. Even when he pulls his shirt off, taking a half second to revel in the lack of pain even with the limited range of motion, it's a mess of shadow, skin tone, and something _else_ that gives him a headache the longer he looks.

He doesn't need to be demon to realize that something beneath the swollen skin is wrong, screwed up. The air thins suddenly, what little color filled the sparsely decorated room bleeding away into near complete monochrome, both the telling arrival of Bálor and the realization.

This isn't something that can be shaken off, no matter how optimistic the doctors were before putting him under for exploratory surgery.

“Fix it,” Finn breathes, eyes still fixed to the mirror, to his blur of a shoulder. His eyes burn, dry. His head aches in full force now, but he can’t find it within himself to look away. “Bálor, you have to–”

Bálor snaps sharply into view, watching him over his shoulder with a bored expression he feels more than sees, eyes too busy searching for the outline of his skin. A snarl of offense builds in Finn’s throat at the look and meets his own eyes in the mirror.

 _“Fix it!_ You _have to–_ you, you– you _ripped,_ you– you _did this to me!”_ Teeth grind painfully, hand protesting against nothing as he attempted to place it over the damage. _“Fix this!”_

Bálor tilted its head, the disinterested look replaced by a sharp, simple glint in cunning eyes. Once, Finn, Fergal, may have felt fear or even dread at the look and its many meanings, but now he only feels weary, older than he should. He feels inevitability and bone-deep exhaustion. He can feel the unsaid question and his answer is as its always been.

“Whatever,” he chokes on a heavy wheeze, blood rushing in his ears, “it takes. Whatever it takes.”

His own words echo back at him, phantom and far away, said over the years. Some versions a promise, some said through teeth, some choked out in pain or through layers of emotion, full of passion, broken, some just a whispered reminder.

Bálor leans in close, it's mimic of his body frozen to the touch with just as cool of an aura, it’s– his– eyes half-lidding as it presses its chest to his back, resting its chin on his shoulder and throwing its arms around his waist in something close and intimate. Terror claws its way up his throat as it noses at his neck, blown out pupils stark against too-white sclera.

 _We love you,_ it says to him simply.

 _Whatever it takes,_ it doesn’t say. _I love you. You’re mine. Whatever it takes. I love you. Whatever it takes._

He hears it anyway, as he always has.

 

* * *

 

One day, he comes home. His mother hugs him, calls him by his name, and he startles a little.

Of course that’s his name, why wouldn’t it be?

 

* * *

 

Finn’s just walking the streets, taking in the sights while he has the time between packed wrestling schedules and shows. It’s a hand snatching up his wrist, an elderly woman looking up at him in worry. He recognizes the symbol on her shirt; an employee of the supernatural shop he’d carefully avoided a few streets back.

“Young man,” she says, voice croaking and grave. “I can see the demonic energies on you– an exorcism–”

Finn can feel every street cam in the area swivel towards him, the TVs on display across the street shriek in an explosion of static. Dread trickles down his spine.

“I think you’ve the wrong man, ma’am,” he pulled at his wrist. She shook her head, digging her nails in insistently. “Ma’am, please–”

“Sir, I’m afraid–”

Her nails broke skin and Finn snapped forward with the sudden feeling of hitting water from great height: like crashing into concrete that made your vision go dark and every point of contact scream at the sudden stop before the water swallowed you up.

Finn fell from a great height and crashed into the ocean of the Demon King, Bálor, and proceeded to drown.

 

* * *

 

One day, he tries to get help. Bálor had been quiet that day, and he'd quickly located a supernatural shop. They offered to pull the demon from within him, not exorcism but something similar, an alternative. The men and women are calm, collected, confident. Totally in their element in a way that let him drop his guard.

One day, all he hears past the howling of the void that erupts from within him is a single, fearful, blood-curdling scream of-

 _D_ _on't let it get out. Don't let it out, don't, don't don't let it get out._

 

* * *

 

He wakes up with something thick and grey-black coating his skin, crusted firm in his clothes. He’s laying in his motel bed, lovingly tucked in with crooked, jagged letters scribbled over every inch of skin that he can’t see under the layers of grime and whatever the dried liquid is. Bálor is silent and still, but when Finn eventually pulls himself together enough to reach for it, it meets him, a larger-than-life, too big, too abstract _affection_ overwhelming all of his senses.

Finn barely makes it out, biting hard into the flesh of his hand to ground himself, but the only thing he can make out is–

His phone has no battery when he fumbles for the charger, so he knows it’s been at least a day. His body fights him, every minuscule twitch of _anything_ setting off a cascade of tendons, muscles, his skin itself protesting. There’s a hypersensitivity to everything, slowing him down, but he manages to the bathroom sink and drinks like a man dehydrated. For all he knows, he is.

Finn doesn't look towards the mirror.

The shower takes nearly an hour to scrub all the grime away, to clear the dried and flaking grey-black from his skin. His clothes are beyond saving, and it had taken nearly a half an hour in itself of scrubbing to find his skin under it all. Overwhelming relief finds his skin fine, only blemished by the barely recognizable lettering. It covers _every_ inch of him, he discovers. Finn’s not entirely surprised; it's been years since he had been truly surprised at Bálor's nature.

Bálor’s constant stream in the back of his mind peaks up in interest at that half-hearted thought. He ignores it until he realizes the childish handwriting, the letters, are actually just spaced out words. He can make out a few strands of repeating words.

 

**_O RB AL O R B ALO RB ALO RBA L OR B A L O RBA_ **

**_E IL OV E YO UILO V E YOU_ **

**_A TE V E RI TT A KE SW H A T E VER I TT AKE S_ **

**_UR EM I N E Y O UREM I NE Y O U R EM I_ **

 

It’s been years. The fear is stale in the back of his throat.

Some of it is in pen, wiping away easily in a few firm wipes. Some of it is in Sharpie, which takes a little longer. His skin is raw, oozing into the shower water, collecting at his knees as they eventually give out and slowly trickling into drain, when he reaches the remaining lettering that seems to be under his skin. Like fresh tattoos.

Eventually, he gives up. Eventually, he turns the cold water off and climbs out with exhausted limbs and creaking joints. His phone is charged. His friends are panicked as the texts catch up, rolling in one after the other. His mother, the fool still faithful to a lost son, tells him to eat, to rest. The rest are mostly worthless, and he sends off a mass text with a bullshit explanation he can’t bother to properly think out. He forgets it as soon as he sends it.

Eventually, he climbs into the softest clothes he can find in his bag and settles down in the chair across from the soiled bed. His mother had told him to eat. He should do that. There are two energy bars in the remains of what used to be his jeans, one half fallen out. Thank God for firm stitching and his own trial and error thinking ahead.

Finn eats like a man starved and mindlessly agrees to a meeting after a good ten minutes pass and the higher ups realize he had no intention of actually picking up any of their calls.

 

* * *

 

One day, he comes home. His mother frowns, cups his cheek and runs her thumb delicately over the bags under his eyes. He leans into the touch, foreign and familiar, and smiles weakly. She says a name, not his own.

… Wait a minute.

 

* * *

 

It’s been five days.

He’s scolded for missing the few days shows. They nearly called him in missing but had put it off. Half of him thinks it's probably because they figured he would show back up or something. The other half wonders if it's because they were too lazy. Or afraid. Or both.

They schedule a proper meeting in person and Finn covers up tattooed children's script with a thicker than usual button up and tie, jacket over that just in case. Some of the letters creep up the sides and the back of his neck into his hair, and all he can really find himself enough energy to do is throw a scarf high around his neck and hope they don’t see letters stark behind his ears.

They don’t question the scarf in summer Connecticut heat. He doesn’t answer and tightens it as the security cameras track his every move, as his skin buzzes with an energy not his own.

They say they might ban him for awhile. A suspension, a break, they throw around. Take him off TV for awhile, might throw him back in NXT and make something up to cover it. Any chance at a title shot that had been coming up is thrown out the window, no contest. They’ll at _least_ take the days out of his paycheck and out of his future and built up sick days. They tell him they might stick a detail on him, that he can’t just leave out of the blue. He needs to do as they say, when they say it.

Bálor rushes forward like the tide, each word building into a wave that drowns him for a few precious seconds, and he doesn’t bother fighting it. Whatever they see makes them avert their eyes when he gasps back into his body, craned over the table and clutching his chest, and tell him it’s no problem, just let them know next time.

 _Whatever it takes,_ Bálor simmers in something akin to prideful joy.

 

* * *

 

One day, he doesn’t come home. One day, he realizes he can’t quite remember what his name was.  _Finn,_ Bálor whispers, that overlap of dozens of different voices speaking as one.  _Finn Bálor. Your name is Finn._

Right… his name was Finn(, wasn’t it?)

 

* * *

 

Not long after Fergal became Finn, he caught the smallest glimpse of Bálor's True Form. He barely remembers anything from that day, just small snippets his brain relays more than remembers. He’d been a young man, young, a teen, a _child,_ when he and Bálor had joined. It had only been a glimpse. The corner of an eye in the dark. Just a glance. It had been _nothing,_ he was _sorry, please, please, oh God, oh no, oh please, run, run,_ **_run–_ **

He wakes up with a migraine three months later. A coma, spontaneous, one that doctors couldn’t really explain away. His brain sings with thoughts, concepts, feelings and sensations that aren’t quite his own, a flowing river of something that isn't _his_ in the back of his mind. He remembers something, something about Greek rivers and forgetting things and flowers, but everything is... far away. Like he's been drained. His family show up, though, and every second longer with them are seconds he feels a little more  _himself_ and a little less the parasite that buzzes under his skin. His father kisses into the crown of his hair, and the demon screams. It's loud, in a way brain stuff shouldn't be. Human minds, inner speech, can't really change in volume that isn't there. And yet-

It doesn't matter for now, because eventually it goes quiet. Bored, he guesses.

His girlfriend eventually shows up too though, eyes wet, smile wobbly. He, in all his teenage glory, asks if he can have some blue jello. She laughs, tells him they don’t have any, but for him she’ll ask around.

“For you,” she smiles soft, gentle, adoringly, “whatever it takes.”

 

* * *

 

One day, his mother calls his name. Fergal, his mother says, cupping his face. Fergal. Fergal. Fergal, and–

Oh.

 

* * *

  

Demons were never meant for human skin. Even a True Vessel is barely able to hold together under the strain of something too big fitting into something too small. Fergal very suddenly realizes that as cramped at the metaphorical space is, the demon could crush him to death in an instant. It is impossibly large, impossibly wide, beyond his human comprehension.

 _I love you,_  the demon coos at him, tangled so close into his own mind, his thoughts, he's not entirely sure where demon becomes human. _I have loved you before your kind were able to exist._

Fergal knows that  _your kind_  does not mean human. Fergal doesn’t want to know how old this ( his–) King is.

 

* * *

 

One day, he doesn’t come home, but he realizes. He wonders how many times he’s realized this and forgotten.

His name is Fergal Devitt, but the only name he retains is Finn Bálor. Every few days after remembering, the name floats away from him. Bálor had… let him keep it before, right?

Yeah, Bálor had hesitantly given way under his nagging, right. Let him keep his surname with the title of Prince as a promise. A promise of the pact, the deal, the christening of their union as True Vessel and Demon King. Before Bálor had become greedy and given into its nature and taken what he had given. His true name was F

inn Bálor.

 

* * *

 

It’s incredibly stupid in hindsight, but he introduces himself to it when they really meet for the first time. When Fergal is young, new to Bálor, he holds out his hand and he gives it his name.

His parents raise him like any boy, on supernatural fairy tales long passed down from parent to child. They tell him of Fae, their beauty, their elegance. Their power, alluring and trapping even the most witty of heroes. The traps, he thinks, are obvious. Gaping wide and easy to spot, and yet the hero still falls victim to its jaws.

He watches a documentary a few years later, a nature one. How easily a gazelle falls to a lion. Not realizing it is being baited, that it is in a trap until it snaps shut.

When Fergal is young, new to Bálor, he is scared to speak. He knows, somewhere deep in his heart, that he and Bálor will be together a long, long time. It’s a long, long time to not speak to something that lays so close to him he feels it hum in his very bones, at his very core in a way that unsettles something in the deeper, more instinctual parts of his mind.

Bálor had told Fergal its name, or rather, given him an abstract thought that it responded to like one would a name. He, very distantly and not at all consciously, remembers a story about Fae, and how you never gave one your name. But, another part of him argues, this is no Fae. Fae were kids stories and he was going to be a teen in a few years. He needed to grow up, out of fairytales.

His parents had raised him to be a good, mannered boy. Those stories were fake, but this being in his very soul, this being of content warmth and inhuman purring in his chest, it meant no harm, surely?

On the TV in the living room, prey screams. Something raw and real as the trap snaps shut on it.

When Fergal is young, new to Bálor, he gives it his name.

 

* * *

 

One day, he comes home. His mother frowns, cups his cheek and runs her thumb delicately over the thick stubble that’s grown in. He hasn’t had the time or energy to shave it away, as shaggy as it makes him look. He leans into the touch, foreign and familiar, and smiles weakly. She says a name, not his own.

… What?

 

* * *

 

“I want to be great,” he says, because he knows intimately that the wrestling world itself will have nothing to do with a 5”11, one hundred pounds wet punk from Bray. “I want to live to my full potential. I want to _rule._ I _want._ ”

There’s question in his copycat’s eyes, but any doubt is crushed under his resolve. “Whatever it takes.”

wh. a t  e. v er i. t  t ak e s …? It asks.

“Whatever it takes,” he agrees. 

**Author's Note:**

> I love you.


End file.
